About Cora the Performer:

Photo Courtesy of Laci Talley (Lacitalley@hotmail.com)

Cora Leighton came into this world kicking and screaming, and hasn’t stopped yet. Sometime in her early twenties, she figured out that she could focus that inborn, enculturated, and carefully honed agitation into performance, scholarship, and social change. Over the years, she has found solace in womyn’s communities, queer spaces, play, performance, movement, and education.

Cora has written and performed in diverse spaces and venues since her first solo performance, in which she embodied her Masters thesis on her experiences as an exotic dancer in Los Angeles. Through this unique form of body art, which combines narrative, art, movement, and history, she is determined to bring about slow, careful, and intense social change in the world.

Along this crazy journey, Cora has completed graduate work in Performance Studies, focusing her research and performance on womyn in communities; donated a kidney to a close friend; moved from Philly to Denver to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Baton Rouge, back to Philly, to Brooklyn, and finally back to San Francisco; and discovered the magic that exists in every space through performance as a form of social change.